Lima (my current city of residence) is huge and swallows you whole. It pays no heed to blog posts you need to write or e mails that need returning. So the tardiness of this post is through no fault of my own; all the blame can be put on this enormous and sprawling city that feels like it has no end, where the streets all have similar names and there is no grid-like rhyme or reason to the layout of the streets. (Just a joke, but in all seriousness I have spent much of the past week trying to figure out this behemoth of a city, and, unfortunately, not gotten much farther than a 6 block radius of my apartment.)
So I should start with my experience in the jungle, which is chronologically where I left off from the last post, but first a short detour to last Friday (I would say the highlight of my trip thus far), when I had the honor and good fortune of meeting Gastón Acurio, one of Peru’s (and, many would say, Latin America’s) most well known chefs.
First, a bit of background. One of the biggest draws of this program for most people is the independent study project that gets completed your last month here. The topic is, as the name would suggest, picked by the student, and within my group they range from the rise of evangelism in Lima to the impact of UN Convention 169 on indigenous rights to the mixture of indigenous and western traditions in the composition of modern Peruvian music. Combining my interest in eating and writing about food, I chose to study how Peruvian food has changed in the past 30 years, and how globalization is forcing it to morph into a product that is suitable for an ever expanding and changing global market. Focusing specifically on one dish—causa—which is basically a cake of mashed potatoes mixed with ají amarillo (yellow pepper) and mayonnaise and topped with anything, ranging from avocado and tomato to lobster, I am looking at how and why the cuisine of Peru is changing in the ways that it is.
So, for this topic, all signs pointed to Gastón Acurio as the man to talk to, because he is at the cutting edge of contemporary Peruvian food. He owns 15 or 20 restaurants in at least 4 countries in Latin America, Spain and the US, and his flagship restaurant, Astrid y Gastón, is consistently rated one of the best in Latin America. Luckily for me, Dean Karlan, Jake’s co-author, likes Gastón’s restaurants and is a frequent visitor to them, and was nice enough to give me his phone number. Mentioning Dean’s name was like having a golden ticket, and 10 minutes after I had e mailed Gastón’s secretary on Friday morning, I had a meeting for 4:30 that afternoon. Immediately I set to trying to get as much information about him as I could, so I could feel prepared to talk to him.
At 4:30 I arrived at his office and was ushered up a flight of stairs into the top floor of an apartment building that had been furnished with a state of the art kitchen, a waiting room decorated with the prizes he’d won and articles written about him, and a beautiful model kitchen that looked like it was used for photo shoots. After waiting for about 20 minutes, I was called back to the model kitchen where he was being interviewed by another journalist. The first thing he asked me was whether or not I’d visited any of his restaurants, and when I said that I’d tried to make a reservation but couldn’t get one he said “well I’m sure we can arrange that,” and before I knew what was happening I had a reservation for me and my 6 friends that night.
Figuring that things probably couldn’t get much better than that, we sat down to talk and I began asking him a bit about the changes he’s seen in Peruvian food in the past 20 years. We spoke for about 30 minutes, during which time he told me about his bigger picture project; as he explains it, as long as Peru is exporting a majority of crude natural resources, the country is destined to stay in a lower economic sphere, and will never develop to the level of the US or Western Europe. In his eyes, bringing up the level of cuisine of Peru, by focusing on everything from the physical space of the restaurants you design to the quality of the ingredients you use to the decorations you make on the plates you serve, is the first step in developing the products and services of Peru, so that they can eventually become known around the world as high end products. That is his mission, and he is putting a finger in every pie that he can to realize it. It was incredibly interesting to speak with him, and he even obliged me by speaking in English so I could understand our interview.
The restaurant itself is not showy: there is no big sign (there is, in fact, no sign at all, only the name written on the side of the building), nor is the building big and ornately painted. You wouldn’t find it just walking around Mira Flores—the upscale Lima neighborhood that houses it—you would have to know where you’re going. Once you walk inside, though, you see what Gastón means when he says that he is focusing on every little detail. We sat at the bar, so we didn’t get to see the dining room, but even from the little we saw it is clear that he is a man on a mission; the bar is beautiful white stone that looks like marble, but there are light fixtures underneath the stone so it looks like it’s glowing. The room that houses the bar has small tables and couches, where patrons who are waiting for their tables sit and sip on expensive and elegant-sounding drinks, like the insert drink name here, of which I had three and can assure you are quite tasty. The room is dimly lit and there is a quiet ambient music on in the background, to assure the patron that she is not in a stale tourist restaurant, but a cutting edge, cosmopolitan culinary Mecca. All that, and we hadn’t even been given our bread yet.
Having no idea what we were in for—would we get a menu and get to pick what we liked? Would he just send out some things?—we sat down at the bar and ogled the beautiful surroundings. After sitting for about 10 minutes, the courses started rolling out. The first was the causichas—a spin off of the causa that I was studying—with five different small causas, topped with everything from a lobster salad to crab claws. After that came the ceviche, which was just soulfish—a white fish with a dense texture and a creamy flavor—and ají (hot pepper) marinated in lemon and lime juice.
Then came the octopus.
Jake had told me about the octopus, insomuch as it was the best he’d ever had, but other than that I had no idea what to expect. Until I came to Peru, the eight legged creature scared me, and every time I saw it on a menu all I could think of was the scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when Eddie Valient walks into the bar and the octopus a bar tender, standing behind the bar making 4 drinks at once. But, fortunately for me, ceviche mixto includes octopus, and so without even thinking, I tried it and took a liking to it. In ceviche it really acts as a foil for the acid and pepper, and so the strongest impression it leaves is its chewy texture and a sound like a boot on packed snow.
This octopus was completely different. I don’t know how it was prepared—it tasted like it may have been grilled because it had a slightly charred taste—but the texture was smooth and soft, the flavor very mild and almost creamy. It was served with a sauce that I couldn’t describe except to say that it complimented and brought out the flavors in the octopus incredibly, so when you took a bit the flavors and texture mixed in your mouth and felt like a taste bud massage.
In my mind nothing topped the octopus, but the last three plates were still very good in their own right. The cuy (guinea pig) crepes—blue corn crepes that had a touch of sweetness with breaded and fried guinea pig meat and a satay peanut sauce—and braised lamb with brown sauce were followed by a sampling of desserts, which ranged from maracuya ice cream to an intense chocolate cake. Six courses and three hours later we left the restaurant feeling like we were on top of the world: filled with some of the best food in Lima that we had been graciously given by one of the most popular chefs in Latin America.
For me, it could not have been better.
And now, to bed.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
First, let me apologize for taking so long to get this post up.
We returned to Cusco on Monday after having spent 16 days traveling. We went first to Lima, then to Iquitos, down the Amazon to the jungle, back to Iquitos, and finally back to Cusco. It was, among all else, a lesson in sensory overload and mental digestion of three completely distinct places that, save the common Peruvian flag, are seemingly different countries. But, if there is one thing I’ve observed about Peru since I’ve been here is that it’s a country of contradictions and seemingly random juxtapositions; the landscape almost demands it, with three completely separate climates in the Andes, on the Pacific coast and in the Amazon jungle. Luckily, in the past three weeks, I’ve been able to see a major city in each climate region.
I. Lima
We arrived in Lima three weeks ago, on Saturday, March 21 to beautiful sun and humidity. After the rainy season, Cusco begins to dry and cool off, and since I get cold when the mercury plunges below about 65 degrees I was glad to get to Lima where it was a comfortable 80. We met the director of the Lima portion of the program Gonzalo, in the airport and he took us to our hostel. We were staying in Mira Flores, which is, from what I’ve gathered by talking to my Cusqueñan mother, one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city. It is right on the beach, filled with manicured lawns, gated apartment buildings and fancy cars and has a main street that runs through the middle that could—by a relatively small stretch of the imagination—be mistaken for a city in the US. (Perhaps somewhere in Las Vegas, as Larco—the name of the street—is lined with large casinos that have water cascading down big stone sculptures in front of them.) It is also one of the safest areas of the city that, by all accounts, is quite dangerous and not the kind of place where you’d want to be out along at night. Our Academic Director told us that when you get into a taxi at night you are supposed to take down the license place number and call someone to let them know it. Then you are supposed to call them when you get home, just to assure them that you got home safely. Yes, perhaps it’s a bit over cautious and compulsive, but I’d venture to guess that there is a reason she told us to keep that in mind when coming home at night. But Mira Flores, I suppose a bit like the Plaza de Armas in Cusco, is a suspension of that reality, and shrouds the dangerous face of Lima with bright lights, a 24 hour grocery store that is remarkably like whole Foods, and an outdoor mall complete with Starbucks, Chili’s and Tony Roma’s.
After dropping our bags at the hostel we were led about four blocks away, to a cevicheria called Punto Azul. I should mention that it is a pretty hard and fast Gringo rule that one does not eat ceviche in Cusco and saves their fish fix for Lima, where the seafood is so fresh you can almost see it still moving. (Why would you make a point to have sushi in Nebraska, when you could go to New York and literally trace the two-hour journey of salmon from boat to plate?) But, of course the Cusqueñans don’t see it that way (I’m sure Lincoln, Nebraska is chock full of sushi restaurants), and so for my last meal in Cusco my family took me out for ceviche. It was very good and tasted fresh; I was also able to avoid any stomach or digestion issues, so it must have been okay. In any event, I was excited to taste the difference between this ceviche and what I’d had the day before. I’ve learned, from cookbooks and talking to people, that ceviche is just a broad term for seafood that is marinated in lemon or lime juice. I hope I will be able to tell you more about it after May 10, when I will have completed my Independent Study Project on typical and “new-Andean” Peruvian food, but for now all I can say is that all the ceviche I have eaten is just fish—usually light colored, like kingfish—and sometimes scallops, shrimp, calamari or octopus, with onions and sometimes hot pepper marinated in acidic juice and served over a bed of lettuce with a side of sweet potato and choclo, which is like a waxier version of corn on the cob. It is divine, and though not a substitute for sushi luncheon (really nothing is a substitute for that) it is certainly is a delicious variation on the same ingredient. We also ordered arroz con mariscos—rice with shellfish—which tasted a bit like paella without meat, and tacu tacu, which was a base of rice and lentils with shellfish mixed in. Everything was absolutely delicious, and by the time I left Punto Azul I was convinced that this week would be one of the best I’d spent in Peru.
The next few days proved my initial assumption correct, and exploring the area of Lima around my hostel in Mira Flores was interesting and a nice change from Cusco. We had class in the mornings, but after 1:30 we were free. The first few days we spent wandering around Mira Flores, in large part trying to find our way down to the beach. The neighborhood abuts the ocean, but the residential area is built high up on tall bluffs, which, although providing beautiful views of the beach, prove difficult to navigate for Americans trying to find a beach to lie on. Eventually we found our way to one with crystal blue water and a small sandy area where we could put our towels. It almost didn’t seem real: Monday afternoon with nothing to do except lie on the beach and watch the surfers crisscross on top of the rough surface and try to avoid the rip tide. Welcome to Lima!
By Tuesday Lima was feeling like home, and Gonzalo graciously offered up his beach house—situated about an hour and a half outside Lima—to the 15 of us, to give us a little taste of Spring Break Peru ’09. It is the closest thing to an oasis that I’ve ever seen. After you get outside the outskirts of Lima, driving north up the coast, the buildings and houses start to melt into the sand, and you quickly realize that you’re in a desert. Climbing up from the ground are political ads painted on half finished buildings and billboards advertising Coke and D’Anafria Ice Cream. (These are no ordinary billboards, either. Many of them are 3-dimensinal and all of them have some figure springing off the rectangular confines of the billboard and trying to jump into your car.) We drove for about an hour through the desert, half expecting to see a camel or at the very least a cactus, but there was just reddish brown sand stretching as far as the eye could see. Finally, around kilometer 135, the driver made a right turn and we drove for along a dirt road lined with white rocks for about 3 minutes until we pulled up in front of a big cement house. Gonzalo lives in a gated beach community, apparently a very popular thing for middle class Limanians, which has a stretch of private beach about 500 years long. The houses are all built up on bluffs that surround the small cove of ocean, and so when you stand on the patio you can see about 15 other houses also built up on the bluffs and then just ocean forever. At night the stars come out and since there is nothing around to swallow them up they are vibrant and sharp and alive.
We arrived back in Lima the next day, and still had three days there before leaving for Iquitos. We did some more exploring and getting a feel for the city; I also did some apartment hunting because I’ll be living in Lima from April 14-May 7, working on my independent study project. 5 of my friends will be living with me, and we found a beautiful apartment one in a very safe and family-friendly part of Mira Flores, about a 30-minute walk or 10-minute cab ride from the central plaza, John F Kennedy Plaza.
Part of me wonders if I liked Lima so much because it’s a big city with English bookstores, American restaurants and upscale grocery stores that carry organic fruit and 30 kinds of cheese. (In Cusco they only sell about 5 types, but they all taste very similar and the most popular kind squeaks in your mouth when you chew it. Hence the name, squeaky cheese.) In any event, it is a big city and even though it doesn’t have all the amenities of New York or Boston or Los Angeles, it is relatively easy to simulate an American style of life there. Part of me feels like I’m taking the easy way out: spending my last month here living with 5 American friends, cooking my own meals, reading English books. Am I getting the most out of this experience if I live like that? And I suppose that’s really the challenge of the next month: to take it upon myself to make my experience as real as possible. (And what does that mean—making an experience real? What is “real” Peruvian, anyway? If anyone has suggestions about answering this, please let me know. That’s a big part of what my independent study project is about: trying to decipher what is “authentic Peruvian food” versus food that has been so changed by globalization that it’s not really “authentic” anymore.) I can, and probably will, live in America for the rest of my life; I may as well take advantage of this incredible good fortune I have to be visiting Peru on this program. So, I suppose, at the end of this rambling and indulgent paragraph, I will say: stay tuned for my (hopefully) authentic Peruvian experience in Lima. First, though, down the Amazon, to the jungle and back.
And now, to bed.
We returned to Cusco on Monday after having spent 16 days traveling. We went first to Lima, then to Iquitos, down the Amazon to the jungle, back to Iquitos, and finally back to Cusco. It was, among all else, a lesson in sensory overload and mental digestion of three completely distinct places that, save the common Peruvian flag, are seemingly different countries. But, if there is one thing I’ve observed about Peru since I’ve been here is that it’s a country of contradictions and seemingly random juxtapositions; the landscape almost demands it, with three completely separate climates in the Andes, on the Pacific coast and in the Amazon jungle. Luckily, in the past three weeks, I’ve been able to see a major city in each climate region.
I. Lima
We arrived in Lima three weeks ago, on Saturday, March 21 to beautiful sun and humidity. After the rainy season, Cusco begins to dry and cool off, and since I get cold when the mercury plunges below about 65 degrees I was glad to get to Lima where it was a comfortable 80. We met the director of the Lima portion of the program Gonzalo, in the airport and he took us to our hostel. We were staying in Mira Flores, which is, from what I’ve gathered by talking to my Cusqueñan mother, one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city. It is right on the beach, filled with manicured lawns, gated apartment buildings and fancy cars and has a main street that runs through the middle that could—by a relatively small stretch of the imagination—be mistaken for a city in the US. (Perhaps somewhere in Las Vegas, as Larco—the name of the street—is lined with large casinos that have water cascading down big stone sculptures in front of them.) It is also one of the safest areas of the city that, by all accounts, is quite dangerous and not the kind of place where you’d want to be out along at night. Our Academic Director told us that when you get into a taxi at night you are supposed to take down the license place number and call someone to let them know it. Then you are supposed to call them when you get home, just to assure them that you got home safely. Yes, perhaps it’s a bit over cautious and compulsive, but I’d venture to guess that there is a reason she told us to keep that in mind when coming home at night. But Mira Flores, I suppose a bit like the Plaza de Armas in Cusco, is a suspension of that reality, and shrouds the dangerous face of Lima with bright lights, a 24 hour grocery store that is remarkably like whole Foods, and an outdoor mall complete with Starbucks, Chili’s and Tony Roma’s.
After dropping our bags at the hostel we were led about four blocks away, to a cevicheria called Punto Azul. I should mention that it is a pretty hard and fast Gringo rule that one does not eat ceviche in Cusco and saves their fish fix for Lima, where the seafood is so fresh you can almost see it still moving. (Why would you make a point to have sushi in Nebraska, when you could go to New York and literally trace the two-hour journey of salmon from boat to plate?) But, of course the Cusqueñans don’t see it that way (I’m sure Lincoln, Nebraska is chock full of sushi restaurants), and so for my last meal in Cusco my family took me out for ceviche. It was very good and tasted fresh; I was also able to avoid any stomach or digestion issues, so it must have been okay. In any event, I was excited to taste the difference between this ceviche and what I’d had the day before. I’ve learned, from cookbooks and talking to people, that ceviche is just a broad term for seafood that is marinated in lemon or lime juice. I hope I will be able to tell you more about it after May 10, when I will have completed my Independent Study Project on typical and “new-Andean” Peruvian food, but for now all I can say is that all the ceviche I have eaten is just fish—usually light colored, like kingfish—and sometimes scallops, shrimp, calamari or octopus, with onions and sometimes hot pepper marinated in acidic juice and served over a bed of lettuce with a side of sweet potato and choclo, which is like a waxier version of corn on the cob. It is divine, and though not a substitute for sushi luncheon (really nothing is a substitute for that) it is certainly is a delicious variation on the same ingredient. We also ordered arroz con mariscos—rice with shellfish—which tasted a bit like paella without meat, and tacu tacu, which was a base of rice and lentils with shellfish mixed in. Everything was absolutely delicious, and by the time I left Punto Azul I was convinced that this week would be one of the best I’d spent in Peru.
The next few days proved my initial assumption correct, and exploring the area of Lima around my hostel in Mira Flores was interesting and a nice change from Cusco. We had class in the mornings, but after 1:30 we were free. The first few days we spent wandering around Mira Flores, in large part trying to find our way down to the beach. The neighborhood abuts the ocean, but the residential area is built high up on tall bluffs, which, although providing beautiful views of the beach, prove difficult to navigate for Americans trying to find a beach to lie on. Eventually we found our way to one with crystal blue water and a small sandy area where we could put our towels. It almost didn’t seem real: Monday afternoon with nothing to do except lie on the beach and watch the surfers crisscross on top of the rough surface and try to avoid the rip tide. Welcome to Lima!
By Tuesday Lima was feeling like home, and Gonzalo graciously offered up his beach house—situated about an hour and a half outside Lima—to the 15 of us, to give us a little taste of Spring Break Peru ’09. It is the closest thing to an oasis that I’ve ever seen. After you get outside the outskirts of Lima, driving north up the coast, the buildings and houses start to melt into the sand, and you quickly realize that you’re in a desert. Climbing up from the ground are political ads painted on half finished buildings and billboards advertising Coke and D’Anafria Ice Cream. (These are no ordinary billboards, either. Many of them are 3-dimensinal and all of them have some figure springing off the rectangular confines of the billboard and trying to jump into your car.) We drove for about an hour through the desert, half expecting to see a camel or at the very least a cactus, but there was just reddish brown sand stretching as far as the eye could see. Finally, around kilometer 135, the driver made a right turn and we drove for along a dirt road lined with white rocks for about 3 minutes until we pulled up in front of a big cement house. Gonzalo lives in a gated beach community, apparently a very popular thing for middle class Limanians, which has a stretch of private beach about 500 years long. The houses are all built up on bluffs that surround the small cove of ocean, and so when you stand on the patio you can see about 15 other houses also built up on the bluffs and then just ocean forever. At night the stars come out and since there is nothing around to swallow them up they are vibrant and sharp and alive.
We arrived back in Lima the next day, and still had three days there before leaving for Iquitos. We did some more exploring and getting a feel for the city; I also did some apartment hunting because I’ll be living in Lima from April 14-May 7, working on my independent study project. 5 of my friends will be living with me, and we found a beautiful apartment one in a very safe and family-friendly part of Mira Flores, about a 30-minute walk or 10-minute cab ride from the central plaza, John F Kennedy Plaza.
Part of me wonders if I liked Lima so much because it’s a big city with English bookstores, American restaurants and upscale grocery stores that carry organic fruit and 30 kinds of cheese. (In Cusco they only sell about 5 types, but they all taste very similar and the most popular kind squeaks in your mouth when you chew it. Hence the name, squeaky cheese.) In any event, it is a big city and even though it doesn’t have all the amenities of New York or Boston or Los Angeles, it is relatively easy to simulate an American style of life there. Part of me feels like I’m taking the easy way out: spending my last month here living with 5 American friends, cooking my own meals, reading English books. Am I getting the most out of this experience if I live like that? And I suppose that’s really the challenge of the next month: to take it upon myself to make my experience as real as possible. (And what does that mean—making an experience real? What is “real” Peruvian, anyway? If anyone has suggestions about answering this, please let me know. That’s a big part of what my independent study project is about: trying to decipher what is “authentic Peruvian food” versus food that has been so changed by globalization that it’s not really “authentic” anymore.) I can, and probably will, live in America for the rest of my life; I may as well take advantage of this incredible good fortune I have to be visiting Peru on this program. So, I suppose, at the end of this rambling and indulgent paragraph, I will say: stay tuned for my (hopefully) authentic Peruvian experience in Lima. First, though, down the Amazon, to the jungle and back.
And now, to bed.
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